


Only in the Night, Eureka

by enmity



Category: Tales of Legendia, Tales of Series
Genre: F/M, bleak and highly whack XD, repost bc i accidentally deleted this like a dumb ass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-21 06:36:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16571516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: The first mistake is wanting.





	Only in the Night, Eureka

**Author's Note:**

> repost because i accidentally deleted ahxjcjc
> 
> this ship woke me up in the middle of the night and called me boo boo the fool

The day he falls in love with her is the day he learns to hate wanting.

It does not start on that stormy day on the ship, with him dressed in Orerines garb, his Teriques recalled into inky blackness as he watches her slip away, the waves ringing in his ears as it carries away the boat and her with it. He stands on the beach with his mouth taut and hand clenched and thinks _again_ and stops before he can resent too much the fact she is always out of grasp, always one step removed from where he can reach out and take her and guard her from harm, like he is meant to.

That dreadful young man is with her still, standing by her side like he has ever since he slipped through the cracks, a snowy-haired trespasser in a sea of blue and blonde – _where I should be_ , but he has learned that wanting is a worthless sentiment – and that too, is a constant Walter has taught himself to despise.

It does not start then.

He steps away from the shore. He needs to go see Maurits.

He will try again.

.

It starts earlier.

He relives the day in absent moments, when the night stretches overlong and he forgets the feeling of regret, a blade sliding down his spine and sinking into marrow, and there is a private satisfaction in pain, in picking at the wounds of what-ifs and should-haves.

He is fourteen, and the Merines is stepping onto the platform. He is fourteen when tragedy strikes, and he is a witness to her tears, her knees buckling and the ground a smother to her sobs as seawater clings to her like a poisonous second skin. He is fourteen when the village turns to ash and he wants to have done it differently, wants to have been the one to notice first the signs of danger, wants to have run up through the congregation screaming and making sure it had never happened at all, that he would never have to see her cry like that, pain scoring lines across her face.

At seventeen, Walter turns over on the bed, counting the shadows on the ceiling instead of his failures. Her childhood home burns red behind his eyelids as he wills himself to sleep.

.

 _Why are you doing this,_ the Merines mouths, voice weak and smothered in the dark shield he’s fashioned to guard her. Just her. There is fear in her eyes, an uncomfortable mirror of an expression buried in a memory he’d rather not recall, but what’s worse is knowing this time, he’s the cause of it.

It shouldn’t matter. Surrounded by his eres she’s safer than she’s ever been, and hasn’t he saved her, ripped her away at last from that accursed outsider? Isn’t it all that matters? He’ll take her to the village where her throne awaits and she’ll be _safe_ and she’ll learn to forget her old life, and everything will be fine. He doesn’t need sympathy or understanding, and he needs least of all to entertain himself with foolish notions of _wanting,_ he doesn’t doesn’t _doesn’t_ —

But it is him who makes the mistake of looking at her for a moment too long. Looks at her and the uncertainty and unmistakable caution flickering across her face, and the sinking knowledge that he’s a stranger to her sends a pang of something cold and hollow in his chest, a dull knife chiseling at his core.

He remembers the first rite. Remembers the way she gasped and struggled and clung to life, cheeks burning as her sister cradled her, calling out, _Shirley, Shirley say something—!_

Her lips tremble, _Who are you?_

He thinks: _I am here to protect you._

He thinks: _my name is—_

“Now is not the time. Let’s go,” Walter replies, voice flat, and though he turns away fast enough to miss her startled flinch, the guilt stays with him for hours afterwards.

.

He answers at the fourth knock.

“You’ve healed well,” Walter comments. Fenimore flushes for a moment, letting herself in, but recovers quickly enough to her usual prickly self, taking a seat by the kitchen table. Clutched in her hand is a basket topped with cloth, and his gaze lingers for a second before she speaks.

“Yes, well, I couldn’t stay in bed for too long. I hate feeling useless. Are you busy? I won’t take too much of your time.”

Walter nods vaguely, and she shoves the basket towards him without further ado. Bread peeks out from under the cloth, the smell warm and appetizing. “I happened to make too much,” she explains.

A distant part of him recalls how her parents were removed from the equation early into her childhood, and after the Orerines came and went and she survived while her friends did not, her sister was all she had. He examines a loaf. She isn’t such a bad cook.

“Thanks.”

She leans over an inch, “By the way? For someone of your position… you _really_ need to feed yourself better. Have you even been sleeping _,_ lately? Jeez. You can be such a mess.”

“I have work to do,” he says, already moving to shoo her. She frowns. “Can you go?”

Fenimore is partway out the door when she looks over her shoulder, clutching at one sleeve. He knows beneath it lays a map of scars that are only now beginning to fade. Trauma is learned, and this is her body’s way of remembering terror, the things Vaclav’s soldiers did to her. Unspeakable. He has seen the records, heard the stories. He knows better than to ask.

“If we win this war…” her voice skirts the edge of hesitation, “no one will bother Shirley anymore, right? The Orerines… I mean, she won’t have anyone to fear anymore, won’t she?”

He regards her briefly, quietly. The line of her mouth is as sharp as his own, and their eyes share a similar shade of distrust. Seen the right way, the right angle, they could almost be siblings, instead of two strangers plucked together by strings of coincidence and circumstance. It’s discomfiting, the resemblance. Almost and not-quite, similar and not the same.

And he figures, with no small amount of rue, it would be a given that for both of them everything must always return to the Merines.

“It’s not a matter of _if_ ,” he answers.

Fenimore nods, and there is a hopeful innocence to her tight smile. The lingering ghost of the girl captured, forever trapped in the cell as his eres shrouded her and pulled her to safety.

She left a part of herself to rot, while the rest of her survives. Trembling and wounded and afraid— but alive. Such is the cost.

(He thinks of the Merines, motionless in her prison, tubes and machinery hooked up to drain the life away from her. Every scream muffled by the glass, the water pounding against it, and she never comes out quite the same. A familiar nightmare, but the imagery makes his insides twist all the same.)

“Thank you. Good luck, Walter.”

She never points out how he chooses not to address the other question.

.

“Why did you bring them?” Walter asks – demands, harsher than he meant, and the girl does not flinch. “Tell me! You know outsiders aren’t allowed here, now more than ever.” Especially not them. Not _him_.

“What else can I do?” Fenimore says, characteristically defiant even as she fidgets with her hands, her dress, and he’d be a fool not to notice the undercurrent of resignation in her voice. She sighs. She sounds very tired. The sentinel titters by her feet, in apparent need of repair. “They’re – Senel… Shirley’s very lonely. She needs hi- her family. There isn’t anyone she needs here. I called them back for her, so. So there.”

She stills. He wonders how much it took out of her to admit who she did it for. Who she’d do anything for. Wonders if it’s easier for her to say it, knowing he feels the same.

He always hated to wonder.

Fenimore doesn’t meet his eyes. Too prideful, perhaps, to show him the hurt, the conceit; the bruised pride of someone putting her hands up and admitting she can only do so much after all. The pride of a selfless girl, he realizes, and that is where their similarity ends.

“Alright,” Walter says, slow, and steps away. He has begun to form his plan. “It’s fine. If anything, that makes things easier. Good night, Fenimore.”

Before she can ask, he is already turning to leave. The leaves crumble beneath his footsteps, in the dark.

.

Fenimore, dying. He is too late. The sun is bright and painful, light spilling from heaven and clinging onto them, and as he feels for the waning pulse it hits him, this is the closest they’ve ever been. That her eyes, wide and blinking, and the warmth seeping from the hole in her stomach is the last memory he’ll have of her.

He has never looked at her, not really. She isn’t like the Merines, whose beauty is quiet but blinding, drawing his attention like blood, every smile aching to witness knowing they are never meant for him. He has never looked at Fenimore because her beauty has never compelled him to look away and make him hate himself for wanting more all the same.

But this time, he does.

Maurits’ voice rings warily from his left, but he can barely hear when the girl beneath him is drawing her last breaths, mouth quivering into a smile even as her eyes close and her blood glistens in his palm, because love is selfless and beautiful and Fenimore is, she is selfless and sacrificial to the very end. She dies for the Merines and this is the ending she wished for, when she let go and abandoned and let herself be run through. She knew: she wouldn’t have chosen differently.

His hand trembles.

“Fenimore…”

She says nothing but the air wavers around her mouth, moving to trace the shape of her words. Fenimore’s eyes are very bright, and very blue, and soon the blue will swallow her whole, drown her until nothing remains in her dead, dead eyes but a cold mirror of his own defeat, of himself and what he is willing to become.

_You’re doing this… for her too._

Neither a request, nor a wish. Just an acknowledgement.

He is too late for Fenimore. But he is not too late for the Merines.

He pulls himself standing.

.

Later, he would think she wanted the Merines to be happy _._

(What he does not allow himself to acknowledge: happiness and safety are separate things.)

.

It starts like this:

_Protecting the Merines is your duty. Your place is by her side: a birthright, a providence._

_Your responsibility is great. Do not fail us, Walter._

He is a good son and so he listens to what he is told. He learns their legends, learns to fight, learns to put the weight of purpose into his steps and land with precision, to shed the split-second hesitation before getting up to run after her, again and again. The Merines’ beauty is quiet but overwhelming, and soon he teaches himself to stand from afar, to keep her in fragments for his private admiration: the smiling crease of her eyes, her bubbling laughter at her sister's conspiring whispers, the rare times she carries herself with a bounce to her steps, when she thinks no one looks.

He has always been good at paying attention, and so when the other boy arrives, with his scuffed knees and ragged clothes and foreign name, he is first to notice the way she smiles in his presence, a smile brighter for a stranger than any he’s ever had the privilege to see. A secret they will never share.

Something in him twists irrevocably at the thought, and the smoldering anger settling within him is one he never quite outgrows.

But he is patient, too. He watches and wants and waits, trusting his chance to come, and it is on the day the soldiers come and his house and his brothers are razed along with the village that he realizes—

“The Merines is gone.”

He has failed.

.

He will not fail again.

.

He drags a bloodied trail down the floor, inching closer to her throne, by her side, the only place he has ever belonged. Their footsteps close in from his peripheral but he can’t see them, not when the Merines is right in front of him, a savior in all her glory, and her eyes are the heavy, drowning shade of blue as she regards the world and all its sins – because she will be the one to absolve them, to be the end and the beginning. He thinks: this is destiny, and she has fulfilled it.

But when he stops holding his breath, her judgment does not come.

.

So it is at the end that he falls, knees hitting the ground in a sad mockery of kneeling, because if he is to die, then he shall do it submitting to her. Senel stands over him, eyes brimming with pity, and the words are choking in his throat— _you fool_ —and Walter would say something except he can’t, his mind is swimming with red and the words slip him by, and it isn’t because it’s true, it _isn’t_ …

_It isn’t fair._

He has forgotten the feeling of regret for too long.

Footsteps, fading. Then, a long silence. The ceiling blurs in and out of his vision, and consciousness is a closing door. He reaches out his hand towards the light that beckons, that saves, even though he knows he doesn’t deserve it, doesn’t deserve anything, for he has failed the Merines for the last time, and there are no more chances.

_But I never had one in the first place._

Except—it was never the Merines. Not truly. It was not about duty, responsibility, destiny; it was not any of those things like he has so viciously claimed.

The truth is this: when saw the girl that day, clutching shyly at her sister’s skirt as they passed him by—long before he heard the word _Merines_ , the truth of her birth and the future entrusted to him—he’d wanted her. Wanted to take her hand, and shroud her from the uncertainties of the world, the things they do not know of yet except for their danger. Wanted to lean close and tell her it was okay, it would be okay as long as she was by his side.

He wanted since the start, and never truly stopped.

_And then you came, Senel._

Wanted to look and not tear his eyes away, wanted to feel the weight of her wrist caught between his fingers, the delicate pressure of it against her skin as he whispered a secret of his own—one that now will never be conveyed.

Just another thing he will keep to himself.

.

 _It’s a lovely name_ , he thinks, and feels his eyes sliding shut.

  



End file.
